The moral of this story is that a healthy dose of competition does lead to innovation
A Pentium 4 Cedar Mill held the WR overclock of 8.2 GHz for a very long time
They make decent space heaters though.
These early days of processors I was constantly upgrading between the companies. A Pentium to K6 to a PIII celeron to a Duron and then an Athlon XP and then a Pentium HT before finally the stable era arrived with the Core 2 duo and all the subsequent CPUs largely being small incremental upgrades at more or less the same clockspeed peak and lots of the performance coming from more cores. There was a lot of back and forth in price/performance and absolute performance as various innovations and pipline length increases and clockspeed were release. Things changed drastically in the 8 years we went from 100Mhz Pentiums through to the Core 2 Duos where both companies lead and trailed and you needed to upgrade your machine most years to keep up with modern games.
Fuuuuuck the Athlon XP!
The commercials were baller, though
The P3 was wonderful, I always wanted one. There was something about P4 that I couldn’t get into it.
The great ones were the last P3, Core 2 Duo but not Quad, and the first i7.
